Updates on writing my latest novel & reviewing (mostly) new fiction

Author: alithurm

Review:
Far from land, out in the North Sea a boy (Jem) and an old man (Greil) live and work on a vast wind farm. They maintain and service the 6,000 turbines of which 850 are broken and more are malfunctioning – ‘dark blooms and scabs of rust… seepages of oil and grease … slumped down at an angle, their foundations crumbling like silt.’ This is an elemental world coloured grey – mineral and metallic – where everything is constantly changing and being eroded by the sea; even the old man’s cheeks are ‘flushed purplish grey, like metal discoloured by a flame.’ The sea itself is polluted and sterile, with nothing moving in it apart from human rubbish and plastic. In an evocative description we see:

swathes of shining fluid that coated the surface of the water… shoals of plastic bags and bottles… the brittle shells of electrical appliances.

In this bleak environment set in the not too distant future, the two main characters are so rarely named they could be any of us, or represent each end of one life: youth and old age; innocence and experience. Their only contact is with the captain of the quarterly supply boat who brings the processed meals they live on and occasionally trades with them. To ease the boredom and acute isolation the man and boy play tricks and try to outmanoeuvre each other like an elaborate game of chess. The old man salvages artefacts from the seabed, evidence of the Stone Age civilisation who lived there when it was ‘Doggerland’ before sea levels rose and it was submerged. The boy’s main obsession is to find out what happened to his father who worked on the farm before him and who mysteriously disappeared. When he finds a shoe at the beginning of the novel he thinks it could be his father’s.

This inventive novel, written with a pared-down style that still admits genuinely beautiful poetry, has echoes of Waiting for Godot and The Truman Show. A very impressive debut from Ben Smith about isolation, selflessness and the indefatigable human urge to create and explore.

Background information about Doggerland:
Named after the Dogger Bank (familiar to listeners of BBC Radio’s shipping forecast) which in turn was named after the 17th century Dutch fishing boats called doggers, the prehistoric existence of a now submerged area of land linking Britain to mainland Europe was established in the late 19th century. It featured in a short story by H G Wells. In the 1990s interest was revived by archaeologist and academic, Bryony Coles, who named the area “Doggerland”

Map of how Doggerland might have looked.

Around 6,000 years ago, the nomadic Mesolithic people were forced out of Doggerland by rising water that engulfed their low-lying settlements. Modern fishermen often find ancient bones and tools that date to about 9,000 years ago.

The skull of a woolly mammoth, discovered in the North Sea in 1999, in the area then known as Doggerland. Image: OGMIOS/CREATIVE COMMONS

Now (2018 onwards) archaeologists working for Swedish energy firm Vattenfall are examining a set of ‘cores’ recently extracted from the seabed as part of the developer’s surveys for its Norfolk Boreas offshore windfarm. The core samples provide an almost unbroken record of pre-historic environmental change from the end of the last Ice Age through to the flooding of Doggerland. The research will shed light on how quickly our ancestors would have needed to adapt to the changing coastline, as rising sea levels flooded the North Sea through the English Channel and cut off the British Isles from the European mainland. Climate scientists say a similar situation could affect the billions of people who live within 60 kilometers (37 miles) of a shoreline today, if polar ice caps continue to melt at an accelerated pace.

My plan in January 2018 was to read mainly books by women – to make up for all the years of reading the male cannon. However I made an exception for books by male writers:
1. in translation,
2. of colour and
3. for research. (I also allowed myself to read two by Julian Barnes just because…)

And I’m pleased to say it’s been a great year. Of the 72 books I’ve read, 60 have been by women and at no point have I felt I’m missing out in any way. I’ve read some brilliant, nuanced and imaginative work – fiction, poetry and non-fiction.

Here are a few of my favourites (all published 2018 unless indicated otherwise).

Joyful, funny story about Barry, his marriage and his gay lover (published in 2013).

Gripping novella. Tensions rise at an iron-age re-enactment weekend.

Set in the Blue Ridge Mountains a young woman is attracted to a stranger with a mysterious past.Dystopian, dark tale of three sisters living on a largely deserted island – feminism, love and male control.

Helen Dunmore’s posthumously published collection of beautiful, moving poems – a meditation on death and dying. Costa book of the year 2017.

My dear friend Fiona’s first collection of poems – shortlisted for the TS Eliot poetry prize 2018… Politics, life & death, & behind the iron curtain.And two to look out for in 2019:

FebruaryThe Dreamers is a quietly devastating page turner: a small Californian town is under threat when a mysterious virus starts spreading from the local college; people fall asleep and can’t be woken.

April

The Confessions of Frannie Langton – a murder-mystery but also a literary page-turner about a young, mixed race girl in the early 19th century about to be hanged for murder.

In 2019 I’m going to read more books in translation and books by women writers from Africa as well as some neglected classics.

My plan in January 2018 was to read mainly books by women – to make up for all the years of reading the male cannon – with the exception of books by male writers 1. in translation, 2. of colour and 3. for research. (I also allowed myself to read two by Julian Barnes just because…)

And I’m pleased to say it’s been a huge success. Of the 70 books I’ve read, 60 have been by women and at no point have I felt I’m missing out in any way. I’ve read some brilliant, nuanced and imaginative work – fiction, poetry and non-fiction. Now for the new year…

An excellent and very enjoyable anthology of short stories, by both established and new writers, inspired by 100 years of women’s suffrage, The Word for Freedom is the brainchild of the author, Rose McGinty. Sales of the book will raise money for the work of Hestia, an organisation with a crucial role in running refuges and giving support to women and their children escaping domestic abuse in London.

The stories themselves range from the historical (set at the time of the Suffragettes) to the contemporary, and we see women at all stages of life and in a variety of settings. There is darkness of course, but also humour and above all hope that women can overcome whatever life throws at them.

I’d recommend this book to anyone who calls him or herself a feminist.

Eggshells by Caitriona Lally is a darkly hilarious and moving novel about feeling that you don’t fit in. Vivian lives alone in her dead great-aunt’s house and spends every day (like a 21st century Leopold Bloom) walking the streets of Dublin. Other people and all their words and conversations make no sense to her and she can’t understand how to live in the ordinary world. Vivian believes she’s a changeling, and is looking for a portal to take her back to where she thinks she belongs.

In the vein of the best-selling Eleanor Oliphant is Completely Fine, this novel is a depiction of acute loneliness. Vivian’s parents are dead, her sister can’t stand her and she has no idea how to make friends, so writes a notice and pins it to a tree:

WANTED: Friend called Penelope. Must Enjoy Talking Because I Don’t Have Much to Say. Good Sense of Humour Not Required Because My Laugh Is a Work in Progress. Must Answer to Penelope: Pennies Need Not Apply. Phone Vivian

For me it took time to get used to Vivian’s strange world but once I did there were many moments of laugh out loud humour. Her neighbours comment on her behaviour:

“Ah, Vivian, would you look at yourself, a grown woman up a tree on a day like today.”

When reminded by David, her social worker to keep an open mind she says:

“I am open-minded … sometimes I wear my slippers on the opposite feet to change my worldview, even though it makes me hobble.”

At heart this is a book about language and how we use and misuse it. As she journeys around Dublin, Vivian collects lists of words making patterns and connections and trying to find hidden meanings. She’s not ‘neurotypical’ and is therefore unlikely to change her (to us) eccentric ways of thinking, so don’t expect character development, but if you love a novel that plays with language you’ll enjoy reading Eggshells. As an unreliable narrator her skewed understanding of the world makes for some very funny one liners and achingly funny set pieces.

She may be a tragic and lonely figure but Vivian is a feisty, determined character getting on with her life against the odds; by the end there are glimmers of hope that something may change for the better, even if she never finds her portal. Eggshells reflects our own image back as we observe Vivian’s struggles and is a bid for acceptance and understanding of human differences.

Newly published by the Borough Press, Eggshells was first published in 2015 and has recently won The Rooney Prize for emerging Irish writers. As chair of the selection committee, literary agent, Jonathan Williams said: “Caitriona Lally’s only novel, Eggshells, is a work of impressive imaginative reach, witty, subtle and occasionally endearingly unpredictable.

Due to be published on 12th November this is a debut flash fiction collection from award-winning writer, F J Morris.

It’s a bit like saying ‘Don’t think about an elephant’ so of course you can’t help it, only in this case it’s the ghostly presence of the great David Bowie floating through these stories. His songs (their titles), influential fashion-sense and his (almost) staged and unexpected death link surreal, surprising stories rooted in everyday life with a twist of sci-fi. The collection includes very short flash fiction as well as verse and some longer stories. An impressive range.

In the opening story, When David Bowie moved in, a failing relationship is pushed to breaking point after ‘pieces of Bowie landed daily’. When a woman feels her heart becoming cold and she starts to grow scales, in Loving the alien, she hopes it’s ‘a sickness that would go away’ but ‘It was genetic; an alien gene in my very DNA.’ With this metaphor F J Morris examines the impact on a relationship of the death of a baby, and the way the couple each hide their emotions. Other dark or challenging subjects are given this slant approach: child abuse in Blooming Scars and the loss of a sister in Swings and Rocket Ships. In the poem A Song of Space the writer plays on the contrast between Space with a capital ‘S’, ‘arms holding supernovas and planets and milky ways’ and the minute space formed by ‘the semicolon between now and then.’

Talking of semicolons, I particularly enjoyed the more experimental Slush Puppies that cut punctuation and capital letters altogether, echoing the experimental nature of adolescent sexuality: ‘I know she would taste sweet like her candy-floss hair.’

This Is (Not About) David Bowie is a collection that combines a light touch with serious undertones that question what it means to be human. Now to dig out my old Bowie records…

This Is (Not About) David Bowie will be published on 12/11/18 in eBook and paperback.

Thrilled to have signed the debut novel from Ali Thurm for Retreat West Books. One Scheme of Happiness is a story of desire, obsession and delusion and just how far you will go to get what you think you want. It was shortlisted for the 2018 Cinnamon Debut Novel Award and the narrator Helen is telling the story of her complicated and deceitful friendship with married couple, Sam and Vicky.
Friends when they were children, they are all now in their forties and haven’t seen each other since school. Helen has remained in their home town to look after her sick mother and when Sam and Vicky return to try and repair their shaky marriage she gets embroiled in their games, but she’s also playing some of her own and things spiral out of control. Ali’s writing is beautiful and atmospheric, and I am very much looking forward to bringing this story to the world.

Ali Thurm is a novelist, poet and teacher living in London. Her poems have been published in magazines and anthologies, and in 2016 she was shortlisted for the Bridport Prize. Her first poetry collection was shortlisted for the Cinnamon Press debut poetry collection in 2015. In 2017 she was longlisted for the Bath Novel Award and shortlisted for the First Novel Award (Daniel Goldsmiths). She also won a prize in the 2017 Troubadour International Poetry Competition. Ali completed City University’s Novel Studio course in 2013, where she worked on the draft of One Scheme of Happiness. She is represented by Emily Sweet at Emily Sweet Associates.
Ali said:

‘I’m thrilled that Retreat West Books has taken on One Scheme of Happiness. I’ve been working on the novel for several years with the support of a group of friends from my City University writing group and with advice from my agent, Emily Sweet. I’m looking forward to working with Amanda and to benefitting from her expert editorial skills to make the story really shine.My first-person narrative explores what can happen to a character when the lid istaken off her deeply-repressed emotions and how, without support, mental-health issues can lead to destructive and disastrous choices.’